Life in the fallen world is tragic, and it devolves to writers to artfully identify and name the trans-tragic, which includes love, joy, faith, hope, and courage. This challenge is real enough and rare in its successful achievement. Poems here address many of these themes, paying special attention to aspects of Southern history, culture, and tradition. They praise what is excellent while denouncing and rejecting prejudice, cruelty, and injustice in all history. The book catalogs "the good and the evil" and envisions an ultimate positive outcome for all peoples built on the foundation of faith in a Higher Power.
Raised and educated in five Southern states, Thomas Ronald Vaughan is a poet, author, and ordained minister. He has spent his career as a healthcare administrator and parish minister in the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church (USA). His writings include three works of theology, and this, his seventh book of verse. Many of these are available through Wipf and Stock imprints. He and his wife, Jayne, live in the mountains of western North Carolina, near Asheville.
“In this collection, Vaughan proves that to be profound, poetry need not be obscure. His poems focus on the ‘quite ordinary but tragic intersections’ that can occur ‘on any given day,’ with which all readers will readily identify. Throughout, the author’s faith is evident—faith in God, no doubt, but also faith that humanity, formed in God’s image, can learn, adapt, and endure. Enlightening and inspiring!”
—Ray Moore, author of Slavery, the 1619 Project, and American Education
“From a lynching in the south, to school shootings where the good die young, while holding aging love on a trip to the Ukraine and back, these are poems that grab the heart with a visceral truth that won’t let go.”
—Donna Marie Todd, author of Navigating Loss
“Ron Vaughan’s poetry weaves threads of hope into the tragedies, struggles, and losses of our lives, our time, and our painful history. He sees with a keen theological eye and a warm pastoral heart the power of forgiveness and love to bring healing to our personal failings and our social evils. In laying bare our grief, his poetry opens the way to redemption and life.”
—Lewis Galloway, former senior pastor, Second Presbyterian Church, Indianapolis
“Vaughan’s new volume of hauntingly evocative poetry addresses many of life’s experiences, from the horror of racism (poems from which the book gets its title) and the pain of war to the wonder of creation and the beauty and uncertainty of love. There are poems of doubt and faith and of abandonment and intimacy. Often poignant, breathtaking, enthralling; always creatively descriptive. This is a book to be savored.”
—Sally Woodard, retired Presbyterian minister
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